


it became a sapling

by frostbitten_cheeks



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-29 00:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18767626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostbitten_cheeks/pseuds/frostbitten_cheeks
Summary: Phil packs his things and leaves. In the journey that follows, maybe he's only hoping to find answers that would point him back.(in which phil travels backwards through his memories in order to regain what he’s lost.)





	it became a sapling

In the tail-end of August, Phil sits on the edge of the bed, leaves fingernail crescents on his palms and tear stains on Dan’s heart, says, “It isn’t _you_ ,” with a suitcase and two bags at his feet.

In the tail-end of August, Dan draws his shoulders almost to his cheeks and doesn’t let Phil see his eyes as he says, “You know that’s not true,” and his fingers are cold as he draws them away from within Phil’s reach.

Phil doesn’t know that it’s not true, but Phil is losing all of his words in the back of his throat and has nothing left to say. His hand hovers over Dan’s back for a moment too long before he pulls away, and the dragging sound the wheels of his suitcase make on the tiled floor leaves haunted echoes vibrating in his spine.

Dan tells him, “Leave the keys,” doesn’t turn to face him, and his voice is so low they’re both trembling. Phil’s keychain jiggles in his hand and Dan says, as if an afterthought, “You don’t need them anymore,” and the only thing Phil knows is that that’s not true.

But Phil’s not quite sure of the truth anymore, not quite sure of anything. He pauses, inhales; he takes the keys. The front door clicks shut behind him and his legs carry him away even as he leaves his unsteady breath on the doormat for Dan’s safekeeping.

 

 

.

 

 

PJ opens his door with uneasiness that’s evident in his tense shoulders and in his clenched hands but not on his face, not in his eyes. He gestures Phil inside and says, _I’m glad you’re here,_ lets him stay in the spare bedroom for too long without asking any questions. Phil knows PJ knows, but he doesn’t mention it and Phil doesn’t tell him and in the silence that stretches across the rooms, there is more than the naked skeletons.

PJ doesn’t ask if he’s okay. PJ guards himself outside of Phil’s walls, doesn’t get close. Maybe PJ knows more than he lets on, but the truth remains that PJ sits in front of his work in silence for hours, and Phil drags ghostly feet across the house and doesn’t know what he’s searching for, doesn’t know why.

“You’re welcome to stay for as long as you need,” PJ says, and Phil knows he’s not lying. But as he wakes the room feels all wrong and as he walks the city’s all wrong and when PJ showers he doesn’t sing, and Phil misses home and misses Dan and knows he can’t come back, and so he lingers. PJ makes coffees in the mornings and pretends he doesn’t know, doesn’t know, knows nothing of the silence.

On Tuesday, it rains. Phil takes his shoes and his hoodie and his aching lungs and walks across the pier of Brighton in the downpour, and there’s something of a nightmare about damp woods and rusting fairground rides. Phil wonders where amusement parks are buried when they die, stops thinking long enough to breathe.

When he gets back, the soles of his shoes are squeaking soaking wet and his hair’s plastered to his forehead and Dan’s standing in PJ’s kitchen with a wineglass in his left hand. PJ says, skittish, “Phil, I’m sorry, I didn’t –“ and Dan says, quiet, “Oh. This is where you’re staying,” and as Phil’s heart fractures on the kitchen floor, the wineglass in Dan’s hand doesn’t shatter.

Dan looks at him like he’s staring right through Phil’s paper-thin transparent skin and at the wall behind his back, and PJ says he didn’t know too many times, and Phil’s heart’s turned around and around and around in his chest, chipped-off parts tearing through pulsing veins, lodged into his breastbones.

Dan looks at him, but the wineglass doesn’t shatter. His hand’s steady and nothing in Phil is steady and the wineglass doesn’t shatter.

By the time Phil gets out of the shower Dan’s already gone. PJ says _I didn’t know_ , and Phil says, _it’s okay_. It’s not, but as Phil packs his things and leaves, it doesn’t really matter.

 

 

.

 

 

When his mum calls he’s standing in Brighton railway station, his bags at his feet and Google Maps open in his hands. He tells her, “I’ve got five minutes until the train,” and she tells him, “Come stay with me.”

In PJ’s kitchen, Dan didn’t shatter the wineglass. In Phil’s head Dan looked at him like he’d wrecked everything and his eyes were less blank and his hands more shaking. In Phil’s head, the wineglass shattered on the floor and stained every tile and there was a reason to scream.

His mum tells him, “Come home, Phil,” and he breathes into the phone and says, “Not yet.”

 

 

.

 

 

Phil remembers Manchester cold, always cold, the sky grey and his skin prickling and Dan’s hand tugging at his own.

Manchester, in the dawn of summer, is warm. Phil gets off the train and walks the streets carrying too many bags, his coat thrown over his shoulder, and the air is not humid, not really, but he still feels like he’s suffocating. The streets aren’t as crowded as in London and it’s not raining and he feels a stranger in his own skin, a tourist in a place that was once his.

The Manchester in Phil’s head is this: cheap sweatshirts and Pokemon wallets and clouds and Dan, sometimes smiling, sometimes angry, always there. The Manchester of reality is too polished, too monochromed; the Manchester Eye is gone, and so is Gracie’s flower shop, the Starbucks remains but Phil doesn’t go in, keeps walking, doesn’t really know what he’s looking for but is driven forward by a sense of direction that is perhaps more nostalgia than anything else.

Minutes or hours or days later on the doorstep of their old building, looking thirteen floors up, Phil’s joints bristle and his chest tightens and he stares and stares and can’t bring himself to turn back.

A family of four walks through the door, a father ushering his children inside. Phil doesn’t remember them, they weren’t there years ago. He wonders which apartment they live in, wonders if what was before his and Dan’s first kitchen and room and balcony are now a family’s. He wonders if someone re-painted the walls that once contained all he had in the world, wonders if they reshaped the form of his life.

 

 

.

 

 

Phil still doesn’t quite know where he’s going, lets his feet lead the way. He leaves his belongings with an old friend and takes the bus, stays quiet, isn’t stopped by too many people.

Phil doesn't feel like himself, and he thinks, maybe people recognize him less for it. His smiles come less honest, his mind’s toppling over itself, and there's a space by his side that never seemed to be empty before. He walks off the bus with his hands twisted in his pockets and finds that he unconsciously only carries bags on one side, swallows around the heart that soars to his throat.

The University of Manchester is all tall buildings and old bricks and vines clinging to dear life, it’s full to the brim with people. Phil wanders the halls as if he's chasing something, maybe the trail of old memories or something to keep him grounded. Instead, he finds a lot of things that remind him of a Dan that isn't the one he left behind.

On a corner of a hall he's not quite sure he's ever been to before, Phil leans against the wall, tucks his chin into his chest, listens. The students bustle by him, paying no attention, and down the stairs stumbles a phantom of young Dan, a ghost bleeding out of Phil's memory, wild eyes and heavy shoulders and footsteps that drag on forever. Phil follows him with his eyes and remembers once, a long time ago, a mirror of the same mirage that sat on the ceramics of his old kitchen and banged its head into the cupboards, again and again.

“If I quit uni, I've nothing,” Dan said then, utter conviction and thinned pale mouth and his jeans fisted between his hands, and Phil looks at him from the corner of the hall through the decade that's passed in the same way he looked at him that day, as Dan corrected spitefully, “I _am_ nothing.”

And Phil -- well, he slid down to the floor and looked at the ceiling and said, in the only way he ever knew how, “If you don't quit, there will be nothing of you left,” and didn't ever say, _you have me_.

The words burn on Phil's tongue, after. Dan's always been the talker out of the two of them, Phil's thoughts coming to him in clusters of nonsense, and so his feelings are mute more often than not. He learns to push the words behind his molars and grind on them when the nights get too silent, and the aftertaste of them rise to his mouth now, in a hall of Manchester University.

 

 

.

 

 

Before he leaves Manchester, he goes to that flat one more time. Walks around the neighborhood, uploads a picture of a squirrel to Instagram, goes up the stairway slowly, like he could fool someone he belongs there.

The door stands heavy before him, and he's rooted in his place. It's strange how even places that were his alone were never quite so, his memories stained with Dan, his years coloured by Dan's appearances. This was his place, first -- but it was theirs second, alarms ringing for morning classes and video games cases laid on the table and two toothbrushes by the sink, far more frequently than only one.

He said _I love you_ here sparingly, his mind reminds him -- let himself loose around it like he had nothing to prove, like saying it was no different than not at all, an act of maturity. He remembers the few times he did, catching Dan's eyes in the steamed bathroom mirror or laughing himself silly over an unedited video or, only once, whispering it above Dan's Law textbooks.

“Okay,” Dan said then, twisting around in Phil's swivel chair and looking at him questionably, like he wasn't sure why Phil was saying it at all. The camera equipment in the corner of the room was blocking Dan's left eye from sight and Phil hunched his shoulders, fiddled with the laptop in his hands.

“No reason,” he answered Dan's unasked questions, didn't know how to address the silence; only knew Dan's frame was shaking under the weight of his worries and knew then, for the first time, that Dan was flawed. _I love you_ , he said, and left out, _I can now see all your faults and my feelings are the same._

Phil thinks of his first moments back in this city, stepping off the train and feeling like nothing has changed and yet nothing has remained the same. He looks at the heavy front door and knows he remembers Manchester differently than it is, but only then does he realize he remembers Manchester like home.

His friend lets him stay on the sofa. The next morning he’s gone.

 

 

.

 

 

Seven miles off Reading, Phil stands with his hands behind his back by the gate of a house he used to know, and the tips of his shoes toe the line of the front path but he doesn’t move. Inside the house, Dan’s mum shouts about dinner and the windows rattle in tune with the memories inside Phil’s head, every stair and every wall and every story he's heard long ago.

Phil doesn’t walk in. The grass is shaped like Dan’s childhood feet and the walls are painted with the colour of his handprints and the silence is the ghost of his laughter. Phil fists his hands together and goes into town instead, drags his footsteps behind him.

In Costa, he orders mocha and sits by the window, doesn’t draw in the condensation on the glass. This is Dan’s, the seat and the coffee and the town, and Phil doesn’t know what he’s doing here and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for but knows he’s looking for something, knows his heavy feet brought him here. His heart isn’t any less heavy, his lungs ache with need. The coffee is bitter more than it is sweet and it stings his tongue and it doesn’t offer answers, but maybe it’s because Phil is too tired to ask.

A hand taps on his shoulder. He turns around to a familiar face it takes him a moment too long to name, but by then she’s hugging him hello, her curls bouncing in his face.

The last time he saw her comes to him in bits, in pieces: London street-lamps and leaning on Dan too heavy and the taste of alcohol, the howl of laughter. She might’ve been a Youtuber then, or might’ve been Dan’s friend, Phil wouldn’t know -- he only remembers the train-ride there and holding Dan’s hand under tables and looking at him, eyes and straight nose and hints of jawline lit by the lamp above, and feeling the strings of emotion balling in his windpipe.

“Not here,” Dan said then, hurriedly, bright eyes darting to the group surrounding them, self-deprecating smile more of a sullen apology for his attentiveness than a sign of joy. Phil stopped then, jerked his head, said, “What, I was gonna say your hair looks like Ghirahim’s,” the lie burning his mouth like hot pepper.

Dan flicked his bangs out of his face, stuck his hands in his pockets. He shrugged one shoulder and joined a few friends to buy beers, and Phil was left with a burning mouth and the shrapnel of the first time he’s ever been unable to tell Dan he loved him because of someone else, the first time his feelings meant something to people who aren’t Dan and himself.

In Costa of the distant future, the girl purses her mouth, her coffee threatening to spill from the cup, and Phil stumbles over his parting and belts out of the door, can’t escape the feeling that a single night in London seeped into his bones for many years after, left him with a burning mouth that never healed.

 

 

.

 

 

The temperatures have dropped by the time Phil's back in the city. Martyn's wearing a bright green raincoat as he waits for Phil outside the station, and he shoulders one of Phil's bags when they meet, doesn't ask for permission.

“The place's a mess,” he warns when they first walk in, as if Phil hasn't shared a house with him for nearly twenty years, doesn't know the genetic tendency they have for acquiring more things than they have room for. Cornelia greets him with a hug, barefoot and smiling and offering tea, and Phil chews on his tongue and doesn't tell either of them _stop being polite to me, stop._ They don't seem to know what to do with their limbs, their space, their guest, so Phil takes his belongings and drops it on his makeshift bed, closes the door.

Staying with Martyn is harder than with PJ, harder than wandering. Martyn knows him better, and it's not the things he says as much as the way his eyes follow Phil constantly; they're heavy on him, one look piling on top of the other until Phil's feet feel as if they're carrying thirty added pounds of shame and loneliness and uncertainty.

Some days the three of them eat dinner together. Some days they watch reruns just past noon, and Cornelia falls asleep to the murmur of the screen. Often, they do neither, the house is empty, and Phil's left to find Martyn's stare reflecting at him from every mirrored surface even when he’s gone, only the stare is harsher, less softened by Martyn's worried edges.

Phil misses Dan, the city enclosing him both achingly small and too large. The nights are the worst part, and his sheets are always too cold, and his waking's always to thundering silence.

 

 

.

 

 

Martyn and Cornelia move around each other, unthinking. Phil spends most mornings on the bottom stairs overlooking the kitchen, earbuds in, music muted. He watches two opposite magnets as they balance each other: he goes left, she goes right; he reaches up, she crouches down. It's habit more than it is anything but the synchrony is scraping against Phil’s ribcage, a determined sharp-nailed animal angry in his chest.

"You're shit at drying," Martyn huffs from the kitchen, titles a plate to let water drip to the floor. Cornelia swats at him with a blue-striped towel, impatiently, and he swallows down a snort as he kisses her temple.

"Love you anyway," he notes offhandedly, wipes down the damp plate. Cornelia rolls her eyes, says, "Pal, you're washing the rest of it alone with all that commentary."

Martyn, aged twenty six and forward, started telling Phil he loved him. He handed it over with Christmas gifts and cheered it with weekend brunch beers and tucked it inside finished merch products. "I love you, brother," he would say sincerely, jokingly, unheedingly, and Phil, who once lived with an older brother who'd throw shoes at him when he dared change the television station, blinked.

Later, Martyn answers, "I'm just not fifteen anymore," easy, as the two of them change the cover of the duvet into winter-heavy sheets. "I love people, I tell them sometimes. It's not a big deal."

Phil's breath is solid in his throat, he's choking on it. He nods, slow, and changes the pillowcase instead of answering.

 

 

.

 

 

On a frozen day in early October, Martyn takes him to the woods. He shoves a camera into his bag and throws a wool hat into Phil's hands and doesn't offer many explanations. The world in Dan's absence, Phil exhausts to himself during the drive, is awfully quiet, and his ears are ringing in longing for Dan's constant babble.

The leaves crunch under their boots as they walk. Martyn's car keys jangle in his hand but he doesn't pocket them, flips them around and around on his finger. They pass large stumps and step around puddles, Phil climbs behind Martyn's sure stride on damp rocks woven through the forest until Martyn stops, suddenly, bends to look at a mushroom.

“You should do a video here,” he says, still not looking at Phil, “like the vlogbrothers or something. That's a thing, right?”

The muted ginger of his hair looks almost orange amidst the mud and wood and weeds, and Phil can't recall the last time he's been so silent around his brother, usually his mouth runs and runs until he can't catch up with it and it ends up miles from where his mind is.

“I can't,” he answers, as honestly as he manages. And it's true, nothing but the truth: he's done one video, maybe two since he left. But it's been a month now, more, and other than the odd tweet he's been unable to do anything at all; the camera looks at him angry and demanding and he faces it wordless, he has no more truths to tell.

“You have to,” Martyn says, simply, and Phil knows the words he's really saying, _you have to move on_ , also knows he's right. The wood chirps around them, careless. The drive back is just as quiet as the one before it, and Phil lets his elbow rest on the windowsill of the car, breathes.

 

.

 

 

He takes all the bags he never bothered to unpack and leaves Martyn's flat the following week. Martyn may be right, but Phil's running from his truths even faster than he used to run his mouth and he has no place in his runaway load for those who'd rather give him the facts over the benefit of the doubt.

 

.

 

 

The spare keys to his parents' house is in the ceramic turtle by the door, Phil could find it blind; but he still knocks, a lone drum beating at his temple ceaselessly, a rhythm that wants him far away.

_This is home,_ he tells the drum, tells his heart, tells himself, but he doesn't bend for the keys because his mind is not convinced, and the drum keeps beating on and on.

His mum opens the door with mud stains on her blouse and a smile curved from ear to ear, bigger than the rest of her, almost swallowing him whole. She wraps herself around him immediately, chatters in his ear, but everything's a dull sound and the suitcase slips from his grasp to the floor.

"It's a good thing you're home," she tells him later, sure, shoving his rumpled clothes into the washing machine. She tells him of his cousin and of her petunias and of the pie she burnt for supper, doesn't ask about him, doesn't ask about Dan. Phil looks at her pouring the detergent in and wonders at the last time he's heard Dan's name spoken out loud.

He settles in the guest room by the stairs, the clean white of the walls giving him a headache. This is not the house he grew up in, this is not his room; it’s a space free of memories, free of childhood belongings, free of Phil. It’s a room that has no ghosts and Phil forces himself to sink into it, forces the quiet into a good thing.

A house is not a home. Phil’s mum talks to her sister on the phone downstairs, his primary school picture is hung on the wall by the fireplace; a house is not a home and this house is filled with family, so it should be home, should be familiarity.

Phil resolutely ignores the all the ways it’s really not.

 

.

 

 

When it rains, Phil goes down to the kitchen to press his forehead to the foggy windows and listen. The weeks pass him by cold, unchanging, and he submerges into a routine of nothing, nothing, nothing. Some days his dad asks for help in the garage, and some days he takes the dog for a walk, but most days he stays in bed until the morning’s no longer so and pretends he’s slept late, doesn’t let know he’s barely sleeping at all.

In the kitchen, half past eleven at night, his mum’s huddled by the corner wall with the phone clutched to her ear. She’s in her night robe and she doesn’t see Phil, Phil doesn’t tell her he’s there, he just wants the white noise of the storm and the wind shaking the trees to drown him, create something new of his remainings.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” his mum says, gentle, her face hidden in the dark. “He’s yet to say anything, I don’t know if he will.”

Phil’s heart beats, his world stops momentarily. He has been unaware that his world was turning all this time, the sudden attention to everything spinning around him and skidding to a halt making him dizzy, but here it is, here is his life unfolding before him: his mum, the phone, and Dan on the other side. Phil would know Dan with no voice, no face, no existence, would know Dan anywhere.

His mum hushes, “I know, I know,” and Phil, his lungs not big enough for breathing, shrunken and dead in the pit of his stomach, imagines a world different than his own -- where he rounds the kitchen table and takes the phone in his hand and tells Dan a million times, _I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m sorry._

He doesn’t. His mum whispers, “It will be okay,” and Phil runs, runs, runs.

 

.

 

 

Martyn comes to stay with them on Thursday, rings the bell and smiles hello and pretends he’s not worried. He joins dinner with hands full of creased excuses, _Cornelia’s away_ and _the house got too silent_ and _I just felt like coming home for a while_. Phil’s mum serves the casserole and no one at the table says Martyn’s there to check up on Phil, but they’re all thinking it.

Underneath the table, Phil’s knees knock into the table legs and his limbs are too long for the seat and the broccoli tastes like plastic. Martyn doesn’t say _I’m worried_ but he looks at Phil every time he makes a joke, and Phil laughs along because he’s tired of being treated like he’s broken.

At midnight, Martyn knocks on the door of Phil’s guestroom and leans against the doorframe in the dark, asks, “Are you alright?”, in the tone he never dared use when Phil was staying at his. Phil turns to face the wall, becomes nothing but a sharp figure in the dark, says, “I am,” because the truth is even if he’s not, he has nothing to say.

Martyn sighs and closes the door and his footsteps carry through the hallway. Phil tugs the sheets over his head and wishes it all away.

 

.

 

 

_I love him_ , Phil tells Martyn, eventually, as they’re mowing the lawn in the afternoon. _I love him_ , he tells his grandma over the phone, tells a uni friend he runs into in the street, tells the cashier in the grocery shop when she asks about the sadness wrinkled at his face. _I love him, I love him, I love him_.

_I love him_ , Phil tells him mum at half past midnight from across the dinner table, and she warms her palms around her mug of tea and looks at him like she understands. He says this when she asks about Dan for the first time, hushed voice and her eyes downturned, and when she looks up at him again she says, _you’re telling the wrong people, hun_ , and the thing is, knowing she’s right doesn’t make it easier.

He tells them all _I love him_ , and they shake their heads and ask, _then why did you leave,_ and don’t understand. Phil closes his mouth and clenches his hands and doesn’t say why he had to leave, says _I love him_ instead, because they don’t understand. they’ll never understand, but the thing is Dan doesn’t understand, either, and it’s not fair to tell them when Dan doesn’t know.

In the kitchen in the middle of the night, Phil’s mum puts her mug in the sink silently and doesn’t turn to face him when she says, “I just need to know _you_ know why you left, Phil,” and he tangles his fingers so tightly together it hurts, answers, “Yeah,” exhales when she doesn’t ask him to explain.

(And the bottom line is, he does -- knows why he left, knew all along. The bottom line is, he was choking on the _I love you_ ’s he’d never gotten to say, the ones he’d gotten to say and said all wrong, the ones he’d never wanted to say to begin with. And they were filling the spaces between his bones and his lungs and were scaling up his throat, and he couldn’t breathe so now he’s saying them to strangers instead, strangers and friends and everyone, anyone who isn’t Dan.

On a bus to the city nearing the end of October, Phil thumbs down his timeline and stares at Dan’s latest tweet about Lorde, almost tweets him back. He wants to say a joke about _Lorde of the Rings_ , wants to say _living in ruins of a palace_ , wants to say _I love you,_ doesn’t _._ Only pockets his phone and stares out the window and ignores the way his splintered chest is tearing through his shirt, his heart gushing out of it.)

 

.

 

 

In the living room, his dad falls asleep with the dog on his chest. His mum reads, her glasses sliding to the tip of her nose. And Phil, he exists, and drags his way through each day, and carries the terrible burden of knowing sometimes your misery is your own damn fault.

 

.

 

 

Because the truth, the heartbreaking truth is:

Phil is losing who they are, is drowning in everything they say they are but aren’t, in everything they don’t say and are. Phil doesn’t know who he is without Dan but is starting to think he doesn’t know with him, either.

Phil says _I love you_ and knows it’s true, knows it vividly enough that it’s all he knows some days. But Phil says _I love you_ and at some point realizes he doesn’t know what it means anymore, and then stops saying it because he doesn’t know how.

 

.

 

 

An elderly couple lives in his parents’ old house now, the yard full of toys belonging to their grandchildren, and Phil drives around a few times, observing from afar. Still -- the hole in the fence is where it always was, where Phil used to duck and crawl and scrape his knees and look for animals to befriend, and one day he goes through it, leans against an old tree and watches the house from where he knows he won't be seen.

Maybe a decade, maybe a century, maybe a millennium; forever ago there was only Dan's gloved hands on the back of his neck in this very yard and smiles through computer screens and too much hair for their young faces. Forever ago Phil had a lifetime of short moments in this house, primary school and a dozen winters and growing up, one long spinal vertebra after the other. Forever ago this house was all Phil's ever known.

Now, this is someone else's, and the house is too small for everyone's memories, Phil only gets to save a few. A cold wind chills him, he pulls the scarf around his neck.

_I love him_ , he whispers, maybe to himself, tosses that around in his palms until it's nothing but syllables, nothing but his voice in the wind. _I love him_ , he says, and doesn't know what it means, can hear his voice cracking around it like china.

Phil has loved Dan for so long, he doesn't remember what it's like not loving him. Phil has loved Dan since this house, since boney bodies and muddy futures, since before there was them, since he didn't know loving someone felt widespread and tangible in his core. Phil has loved Dan since long before he knew he did, and he remembers saying it from miles and miles away, remembers mumbling it up close with his nose pressed to Dan's cheek, remembers shouting it from rooftops just because.

He remembers -- saying it because it slipped off his tongue, and later because it was the only way to describe the bubble expanding in his chest. He remembers saying it when all it was made of had been the restlessness in him that whispered _I feel like this is forever even while I'm terrified it won't last_ ; when it felt a little like an addiction, tasting sweeter and better on his tongue, words that were pure-hearted and stupid and baseless, because -- because.

Because they didn't know what love was, didn't have a meaning for the words whispered in the dark, but it sat right in his mouth and between his teeth and when he gave it a voice.

And he never stopped knowing it was true; but as Phil pulls a splintered shred of his heart out of his chest, flips it between his hands, he doesn't know when he started looking for meaning.

 

.

 

 

His mum walks him to the door, the two of them lingering as Phil's dad loads the bags into the cab. She looks at him then, crosses her arms over her chest, titles her head to one side, and he realizes that his mum's never been much of a talker, either, and yet he's never noticed the absence. Her feelings were clear to him, always; in warm hands holding his own and humour she gifted him and a specific slant to her eyes, a nonverbal language.

"You look better," she tells him, curls one arm around his shoulder lightly. He thinks it might be her way of telling him he's right about leaving, her way of saying she understands what he hasn't tried to say. He thinks maybe she knows what he doesn't yet, always and forevermore.

"I'm close to figuring some stuff out," he acknowledges, means it. The heavy feelings he's been carrying is twisting and turning, wrenching at his organs incessantly.

His mun hums, pulls both ends of her cardigan closer together. That slant to her eyes tells him _you are_ , tells him _it'll work out,_ tells him _go._ "And where will you be headed from here?"

He shifts his weight between his feet. His dad closes the boot of the car with finality. The dog barks inside, a farewell. "Don't know yet."

He kisses her goodbye, doesn't tell her of the train tickets his heart's purchased without his permission, and he leaves with his pocket weighing him down into the earth.

 

.

 

 

Piccadilly is crowded and cold and busy. Phil stands. He tugs his hat lower on his ears and his fingers shake around the handle of his suitcase and he stares, stares, doesn’t know at what.

Phil thinks of Brighton, thinks of Manchester, thinks of the train ticket to London in his pocket. He thinks of home, thinks of Dan.

A train stops at the station and a couple embraces. Phil’s heart’s beating and he remembers the cold and the rush and his fingers closing around Dan’s wrist a moment before they hugged for the first time. Phil remembers this: that first year and the one after that, the third one, the fifth, the tenth. He remembers this: cold feet pressing against his ankles at night and the dent of a dimple and too-early coffees before meetings. He remembers: his chest feeling too small for the emotion he’s carrying, his cheeks hurting from laughter, his bones aching with the heavy knowledge of loving someone as much as you can love anything at all. He remembers saying words that meant the thing you went back to at night was more a person than a place.

Phil remembers home, and for once it grounds him, doesn’t slip between his fingers. He tightens his grip, gets on the train.

 

.

 

 

In November, Phil comes back.

Dan’s sitting on the sofa with a cold mug of tea when Phil reaches the top of the stairs, carrying a suitcase and two bags and his beating heart in his clammy hand. He says, “Manchester’s too cold.” What he means is, _I missed you_.

Dan puts the mug on the coffee table and walks to Phil, stands in front of him three centuries older in a sweater that isn’t his and with heartbreak painted over his mouth in a curved line. He takes the suitcase and the bags and Phil’s heart, tucks it into his back pocket. He says, “I’ve got the heating on, c’mon.” What he means is, _I’ll forgive you_.

Later, Dan sits in the corner of the room while Phil sinks into a bath of water fifteen degrees too hot, thumbs through a book he’s not really reading. They don’t talk, but when Phil drains the water and steps out with burning red skin, Dan hands him a towel and wipes the steam off Phil’s glasses, sighs audibly.

Under the sheets, they press knobby knees together and Dan bites his mouth raw and Phil doesn’t say he’s sorry. He does say _I liked your last video,_ and _my parents’ dog says hi,_ and _train rides aren’t the same without you_. Dan’s only response is pressing his frozen knuckles to Phil’s pulse point and breathing.

Dan says _okay_ , again and again. At three in the morning Phil’s head is pounding and he says, “I’m out of train tickets,” and what he means is _this isn’t temporary_ , and Dan says, “Okay.” Phil takes the frozen knuckles with frozen fingers and puts them against his cheek. Dan says _okay_ and means _I’ll forgive you_. Phil whispers, “I’ll wait,” and means just that.

 


End file.
